The Ghost Sister

by Liz Williams

  16. Eleres

  We had been walking for more than a day, resting frequently as I adjusted to this new way of seeing the world, when the ghost boat dropped from the heavens. Mevennen and I waited at a safe distance as it glided down and Shu stepped out. She smiled when she saw me.

  “I knew you wouldn't go,” I said.

  “You've a lot more faith in me than I have in myself, Eleres. You're lucky I found you. But I'm afraid I couldn't help you in the end.”

  “Maybe we can help ourselves,” I said. I told her what the voice in the chamber had said.

  She stared at me. “You think the house defenses might heal you? Turn you back into what you were?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. I don't know enough about our ancestors'ways of doing things. I only know that I want to go home.”

  Shu nodded slowly. “Then that's where we'll go,” she said.

  The journey did not seem so strange, this time. I watched the long lands unfold beneath the path of the boat, and at length we dropped through cloud to see the familiar coast of Eluide.Two hours later, on a cold, gray afternoon, we followed the landpath to Ulleet. I looked at the countryside around me, still seeking meaning, but there was nothing there, nothing but shadows over the land. Yet I could no longer feel any sorrow for our loss. The bowstring had snapped and I was as numb and empty as air. I had never been more thankful to be going home—whatever I had become and whatever the future might hold. The weather had turned around, and a light rain was cold against my face. A curve in the road brought the steep roofs of Aidi Mordha before us, with the long line of the sea and the houses of Ulleet clinging to the cliffs of the inlet beyond. We hastened along the familiar path, the ghost accompanying us.

  As we neared the house, Mevennen halted. She said in a whisper, “What if it doesn't work?”

  And I answered, “We've been through this before, Mevennen. We've both come home out of the wilds. It's nothing more than a step from childhood, all over again.”

  I looked up at the dark walls of my home. I could not see the defense, nor could I hear it. The back of my neck prickled in anticipation, and I shivered. I turned to Mevennen, and to the ghost. Shu nodded, though her face was grave.

  “You couldn't cross the defense, in Tetherau,” I said.

  “I won't be able to cross this one.” She gave a fractional smile. “I'm a ghost, remember?”

  So I took Mevennen's cold hand in my own and we stepped over the line of the defense together. The air shimmered around us. I felt as though I had raised my hand and pulled down lightning. Knowledge burned itself into my mind, searing through my veins and singing down my blood, and in the split second before the defense roared down behind us, I heard a voice say inside my mind, “Download complete.”

  Behind the defense, Shu had fallen to her knees. Together, Mevennen and I reached out and brought the defense down, then I helped her up. Her face was ashen and she was shaking.

  “Even that's too close,” she said. She turned to me. “Well?”

  I paused for a moment, seeking, and then I smiled at her. “There's water under here, you know.”

  And Mevennen's face was wet with tears.

  As we stepped into the courtyard, a flock of small dark birds wheeled up from the gables, moving as one and whirling out to sea, and a single dark blue feather, the color of an eye, fell through the still air to land at my feet. My cousin Eiru was calling out our names, and they all ran together to become one word.

  “Eleres,” she whispered at last, and took my hands. Her face was drawn. I put my arms around Eiru, and after a moment she said, “You're freezing cold. Come into the warmth,” and drew us all inside.

  Within the long inner hall, a fire had been banked up against the chilly air. The polished boards were spread with the thick knotted rugs which people make in the autumn, the settles lined with furs, murhide from the culls. And although it was still afternoon, lamps glowed against the dark paneled walls. I was shivering, and Eiru pulled me closer into the warmth of the fire and began to brew tea. Meven-nen went to rest, and Shu stayed by my side.

  The hot bitterness of the tea revived me a little, but I remained dozing by the fire like an old man, for the rest of the afternoon, and my family left me alone—apart from Eiru, who sat with us for a while and looked at Shu with wonder in her face. It was Eiru who told us how things had changed around the time of our own cursing: the sudden chaos throughout the province, with people struck landblind without warning, and hunts over before they had barely begun, everyone staring lost and bewildered at one another over the necks of their murs. They had been inside Aidi Mordha, Eiru told me, within the line of the defense, and had noticed no change, but the rest of the world as we knew it had been turned upside down. With a glance at Shu, I told her to take a message without delay to the central meeting place of Ulleet, saying that those who were still cursed with landblindness need only to go home, and all would be well.

  I hoped I was right.

  Shu did not, it seemed, expect to see her fellow ghosts again. I asked her where they had gone and she replied, “Back to the ship, in orbit. And then to what might have been a lunar colony, once. After that, I don't know. If they don't find what they hope, perhaps they'll sink into cold sleep again and head for home. Wherever and whatever that is, now … Eleres? Do you know whether there are— people—on the second moon? In the place you call Seramadratatre? People like my own kind?” Her face was drawn and strained.

  I answered, “Legend says that there were, a very long time ago. They were demons, named Mora and Ei. They built cities beneath the rocks. But now surely there are only the dead.”

  She was silent for a long while after that. That evening, Shu came to tell me that she was leaving.

  “Where will you live?” I asked her.

  “I was going to follow your example. Hibernate. Put myself into stasis sleep in the biotent back at what's left of base camp until spring, and then head down the coast. See what I might find.”

  I looked at her. She was surely as old as Luta, and I did not like to think of her walking the world alone. And I had known her when I myself was no more than a ghost, when she had finally become real to me. I had changed once more, but she still seemed real.

  “Stay with us,” I said.

  Shu smiled. “Become the family ghost?”

  “You tried so hard to help us, Shu.”

  “We failed, though, didn't we?”

  “No,” I told her. “No, you didn't fail. You taught us about ourselves, and perhaps in time we can find our own way of doing things.”

  She looked around at the firelight, the solid walls. “To stay here. I think that's a wonderful idea.”

  By the evening of the following day, the panic throughout the province seemed to have abated a little. Shu made several attempts to explain to me what she thought had happened, but I still didn't really understand it. The knowledge that gave us our connection with the world had not been granted by Outreven alone, Shu said, but had been sent from Outreven along the lines of the land, to rest like sinks of water in the energy defenses of houses and settlements. I still did not see how knowledge could behave like water, and after a while, Shu gave up and said that I was exasperating. I thought that was rather unfair.

  A week passed. Others whom I had feared never to see again during my time in Outreven came to find me. First of these was Morrac. His own landblindness had rectified itself on his return across the defense line of Rhir Dath.

  “Madness is bad enough,” he said. “But sanity's worse.”

  After him, much later, came word from Jheru, now back at Temmarec, who had undergone a similar experience. He too had found it chastening. The call to the world was still there, he said, lurking beneath his conscious mind like a sandsnake in a pool, but it was not so strong and he could govern it more easily. He would come to see me in the spring, his message read. Others told similar stories, of a new balance, a new control, and I began to feel that Mevennen and I had not per
haps done so badly, after all, in speaking with ghosts.

  I told Shu this, and she said grimly that it could have been very much worse.

  17. Eleres

  Home at last, our thoughts turned to Sereth's daughter. Blood calls to blood, birthplace to the born, as they say. Sereth had planned to be at Aidi Mordha for the homecoming. With Sereth dead, the closest kin to the girl was Morrac. Since he was here already, best that it was Morrac and the rest of us who called Sereth's daughter home. And at last a day came when the event for which we had been waiting came to pass.

  I had spent the day in the little library, waiting out the first of the autumn storms. I could hear the wind gathering strength again and when I placed my hand on the shuttered window I felt it vibrate. I turned back to the room, cast by the shuttered window into a green dimness. Lighting a lamp, I watched as it flared up into brightness until I could read the titles of the books in comfort. Lately, my hand tended to stray toward the row of volumes on the highest shelf, the metal pages of the Book of the Roads, which relates the history of my family, the only way that we can have any real remembrance. Every family will have such a Book, and ours consists of ninety volumes, written in a tiny script, and of the ninetieth volume the last leaves were blank, for history goes on. The last entry remembered the name of Sereth ai Dath, dead in the heart of summer. The brightness of the lamp flared up once more and reflections danced from the pages of the metal book, blurring my sight, but the edge of my grief had grown blunted with time, and only the love remained. I smiled as I read her name.

  From the shadows, where she too had been reading, Shu said gently, “It's much too dark in here. You'll strain your eyes if you try to read in this light.”

  “There's a storm on its way. I shuttered the windows.”

  Shu lit a lamp. The obsidian surfaces of the library came into sharp relief. I shoved the rattling shutters tighter, but the metal pages of the Book of the Roads remained unmoved by drafts. I locked the book against memories and put it back on the shelf. The room was growing colder as the storm approached, and I drew my coat more closely about me. The storm closed around Aidi Mordha. I took down a book of plays. The wind strengthened, rushing over the peaked roofs like a wave. I couldn't concentrate on the plays and eventually I put down the book. With a murmured excuse to Shu, I went up onto the roof.

  It was still raining, falling cold against my skin and dappling my dark clothes and the black fur of my collar with a fine mist of droplets. I could see no farther than the crags which rose to Ailet, a tower of shadow upon shadow, and nothing visible beyond the edge of the mountains. I breathed the scent of damp stone and the sodden leaves of the woods below me. Looking out across the trees I thought, Sereth's daughter is out there somewhere, perhaps on her way home in time for winter, perhaps wandering south, forgetting. I wondered what she was like.

  Mevennen and Morrac were there before me. Meven-nen's unbraided hair snapped behind her like a banner in the winds. Her face was a small and pointed oval in the darkness, almost lost.

  “How long have you been up here?” I asked. Between the fortress wall and the northern road, the defense almost seemed to glitter in the wind-driven dark.

  Morrac yawned, and showed sharp teeth. “An hour? I've lost track of the time.” He hunched his shoulders, stretching tired muscles, then he turned his head and smiled. For a moment, he looked so like his dead sister that I caught my breath.

  Looking down now through the damp branches I remembered Sereth: first memories, which may have been no more than dreams. I remembered a child with her face, seen somewhere under the moon in the mountains, a white wild face like the thin moon's own. I recall someone running, silently leaping over the rocks of the mountain streams. It may have been during that year that I first sensed the voice which called me back, so that the child that was myself, unnamed and unknown, began to realize who I was and where I should be. I must have walked the whole wide steppe of Eluide, skirting the mountains until the sea curve of the horizon slipped up before me and I understood that the high peaked roofs ahead were my own place.

  After this, the world changed for me and the old animal life fell away. Some months later, a second lean, fierce child came resentfully home. It seemed to me then that things do not really change all that greatly, that time spirals around itself, coming back to the same point again and again. The thought gave me some comfort.

  Closing the membranes of my eyes, I could feel the defense lying in the generation place between old wood and dormant stone and the lines of the land. And in that place I saw Sereth, like the shared vision of the dead that we had experienced at the funeral. She stood in the gap between the worlds, dressed still in her gray funeral robe, her hair full of fire. She was half turned from me; I saw her face in profile, the narrow eyes and her fiery hair streaming behind her in the silence. She was watching the woods.

  I called her name, but as in dreams where one speaks and cannot make oneself heard, my voice fell soundless into the gap. I thought of the chamber of Outreven, and how Shu had told me that the defense contains understanding and visions, but these thoughts did not last for long. The sa-tahrachin say that there is a wind which blows between the worlds, without heat, without cold, from nowhere, and it carries our thoughts away. Out of the smoking silence Sereth looked up at me. Then everything was gone—the dull fires, the smoldering earth of the dead road—and I looked out into the wet woods and knew that her daughter was coming home.

  Morrac was leaning out over the balcony rail, oblivious to the rain. It made me uneasy, to see him so perilously balanced, and I gently pulled him back. His hair was slicked against his head, and water fringed his collar, glittering in the light, for someone had lit a lamp inside the house. Looking at him then, wet haired and beautiful, all my affection for him came back, in spite of everything. He turned his head to the north road and again I felt the pull of the land, the equinoctial tide rushing up through the damp earth and leaf mold, powering the defense. The air smelled of leaves and soil and rain. I sensed the people beside me, but then through all the familiar world a new call came, running closer, pulled by blood and the singing pattern of the land. It was a clear and certain call, sense to sense; another living thing announcing its presence to us.

  “I can't see her,” I said. I was straining to look into the darkness of the woods which covered the north road, but the rain had become too heavy.

  “But I can hear her,” Morrac said. He held up a hand. “Listen.” And very faintly I heard someone moving through the undergrowth, coming steadily on with an animal's stealth. She was making very little noise, yet the sound of her coming was clear to those of us on the balcony, and shut out the other sounds of the world. The edges of the defense flickered in a misty fire across the damp ground. At the edge of the undergrowth, the figure paused, and now I could see her, a faint shape against the blackness.

  “Come on,” I heard Morrac whisper beside me. “Come along,” as one might do to soothe a reluctant animal. He raised his head and gave a long low cry: the calling cry of a huntress, strange to hear in a man's voice. I was reminded with a shock of the day of the hunt, when Sereth had knelt in the dust and called the child to her death. It was seductive, whispering, and it fell thinly down the air.

  The figure on the edge of the woods moved uncertainly forward. Morrac called again, and his voice awoke something in me, some remembrance of my own homecoming. It spoke of safety and security, after a long time of fear. It promised love. It was irresistible. The girl gave an aching answering call and ran forward, out of the undergrowth. She stumbled as she crossed the gleaming edge of the defense, and cried out as she fell. I caught my breath. Then she was over the defense, and safely through the gate of the courtyard.

  Morrac and I were already running down the stairs.

  When we reached the courtyard, the girl lay crumpled in a heap on the wet flags. I stood back, and let her uncle see to her. He crouched beside her, whispering, soothing, and she cried out again and struck at h
im. He caught her hands with ease and turned her away from him. She whimpered with fright. Morrac picked her up in a bundle and took her into the house.

  Mevennen joined us and murmured to her. She looked up into our faces with bewilderment. I wondered what she saw: pale-haired people with sea-deep eyes, unreadable, in a hot unknown room with a tamed fire. She did not yet have the language to describe what she saw, but I could see behind her eyes that she was aware, a human being, and I breathed a sigh of relief that left me almost faint.

  In the firelight too I saw that the girl's resemblance to her mother was vivid in the lines of her face, even beneath the filth. I was unprepared for the pain, but after that came a deep and certain joy that, somehow, it had not all been for nothing. The girl was covered in earth and what looked and smelled like ash. Blood streaked her thighs—clearly her menstruation had begun—and the skin that was visible beneath her covering was scratched and torn by the run through the woods. She was wrapped in the remains of an uncured skin, something like erittera, the little spotted running beast of the high steppe, and it stank of its late owner. Luta, clucking in disapproval, wrestled it from her and threw it onto the fire where it blazed up in a sputter of grease and water. The girl wailed in protest and reached out to the fire before I could stop her. Then she jerked her hand away as she felt the heat and gasped in fright.

  Luta said grimly, “Bath,” and led the protesting girl away. Morrac and I stayed by the fire.

  “Well, that's that,” Morrac said. He stretched out his legs to the blaze; he was shivering with the cold, and with reaction. Before I could stop myself I put an arm around his shoulders and he leaned against me. He sounded relieved. “It makes up for in it in a way,” he murmured, as if hoping I might agree. I did not reply, but my arm tightened around him, my cousin and my friend.

  We remained like this until Mevennen came back with Sereth's daughter. The girl looked sullen; I imagine the bath had not been a welcome experience. Now that the filth had gone, she was already more human. Her hair, which had been a single matted knot, had been cut to waist length and shone, falling down her back in a cloudy mass. Her eyes, like mine—like her mother's—were silvery. Mevennen had clipped her overgrown nails, but her teeth were still too long; we would have to see to that tomorrow. She ate untidily as a result, and looked around her as she did so, fearful that we might steal her meal from her. I left her in the women's care and took myself to bed. She was too much like her dead mother for me to be able to look at her for long, but it was done, at last. She was home.